To achieve high temperature operation of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC), preferably under ambient pressure, phosphoric acid doped polybenzimidazole (PBI) membrane represents an effective approach, which in recent years has motivated extensive research activities with great progress. As a critical concern, issues of long term durability of PBI based fuel cells are addressed in this talk, including oxidative degradation of the polymer, mechanical failures of the membrane, acid leaching out, corrosion of carbon support and sintering of catalysts particles. Excellent polymer durability has observed under continuous operation with hydrogen and air at 150-160oC, with a fuel cell performance degradation rate of 5-10 µV/h. Improvement of the membrane performance such as mechanical strength, swelling and oxidative stability has achieved by exploring the polymer chemistry, i.e. covalently or ionically cross-linking and structure modification With load, thermal or startup-shutdown cycling, the performance loss was found to be much bigger, about 300 µV per cycle or 40 µV per operating hour, due to the increased acid loss and catalyst support corrosion, particularly under open circuit voltage operation. Further efforts are outlined to the future work.

Original language

English

Publication date

2009

State

Published - 2009

Event

the 60 Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry - Beijing, China

Conference

Conference

the 60 Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry